daughter 1.0 used to have kde connect on her smartphone to copy files to a laptop. She broke the screen and I lent her an old one that was sitting in the drawer. Since I didn't have time to help her set it up she was left without kde connect. The funny part is that she connected to her school's google workspace account, yet she decided to send herself pictures via email to access them from the computer instead of using google photos or drive. Apart from feeling a bit hearybroken that my daughter is so computer illiterate, I find it funny how people tend to resort to the messaging paradigm to share/transfer files from one computer to another instead of using more efficient methods.
2025-12-15 · 5 months ago
9 Comments ↓
I'm a professional dev and I use telegram to send files between my devices, daughter is not illiterate, it's a failure first of all of the industry as a whole. You shouldn't need to setup any special software to share files between devices on the same LAN. The PC should have a network folder, where all the other devices on the network should be listed and you should be able to open them (with a permission prompt popping up on the other side) and browse like any old file directory. Your phones share function should include a similar network section yada yada, and all this should come with the OS without any extra motions. Everyone sucks and peddles crap, and the whole thing runs on marketing alone.
The truth is that @namark is completely right. And the most infuriating thing is that this was a solved problem since windows 98 at least. You could even watch videos by browsing via samba and double clicking them. And they pretty much took that away.
I got exasperated some months ago trying to watch a video from my computer in a modern smart TV in the same LAN :(
I suspect the push to take us to the cloud and paid services killed this feature in consumer computers and phones
I mostly use Telegram, email or catbox to send stuff to myself. (I use Imgbb but that lags with images sometimes.)
I find myself with a USB thumb drive more often than appears reasonable. Opening machines even locally to transfer a file seems like way too much trouble and I cannot vouch for all the consequences...
🚀 Tomi [OP] · Dec 16 at 21:24:
kde/gsconnect works very well for sharing stuff for yourself between your own devices easily.
I use messaging tools to send individual pictures/files to others but switch to web server with a simple .htaccess when it is larger like a large photo gallery that I haven't had time to curate.
👻 darkghost · Dec 16 at 22:19:
KDE connect is cool stuff. The awesome feature for me beyond file transfer is clipboard transfer.
😎 flipperzero · Dec 17 at 08:04:
I posted this comment in the station copy, and now will do so here for posterity, with minor edits for the sake of formatting accompanied this post.
I’d like to highlight not only the loaded presumption marking “tech illiteracy” in essentially thinking quick, but also placing relevance in one app ecosystem to another rather than praising reliable smallnet ingenuity.
Don’t be “heartbroken” by your daughter’s email usage for file transfer. Be proud she avoided using anything else that would’ve cost her time, data, and potentially even personal info in favor of an old reliable resource! I send emails of audio clips, photos, and plain text files to myself all the time.
What @flipperzero said.
👻 darkghost · Dec 17 at 10:39:
Tech illiteracy would be thinking the files can't be transferred, such as scanning your phone with a picture on it or retyping a document on the destination device.